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“Death to Van Gogh’s Ear”

by Allen Ginsberg; introduced by Andrew McCulloch

Published: 29 October 2013

Allen Ginsberg, speaking in Hyde Park, is interrupted by the police, July 1967
Photograph:
Rolls Press/Popperfoto

C
omedians are not only beyond embarrassment, they make a living out of it.
Wherever there is a line, they don’t just cross it but hop backwards and
forwards over it, challenging whatever inhibitions or prejudices prevent us
from doing the same, releasing us, temporarily, from the grip of our need to
govern the tongue. Poets frequently explore similar territory. They too
shake language free of the assumptions and taboos with which it becomes
matted in our minds and turn it back into an object of delight. And both
poets and comedians tap into the same Dionysian relish for words, building
preposterous, imaginative, liberating truths out of the very thing by which
others – politicians, for example – attempt to control us.

The American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–97) is the countercultural bard par
excellence. “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear”, however, from his collection
Kaddish and Other Poems (1961) and written while he was staying at the Beat
Hotel in Paris, is saved from turning into the kind of undisciplined Marxist
rant it could easily have become in less skilful hands by the tragi-comedy
of Ginsberg’s insistence on squaring up to the power of the republic armed
with nothing more than words. Albert Einstein, Jean Genet and Bertrand
Russell struggle – in the end unsuccessfully – with Wall Street
and the House of Representatives. Although Ginsberg concedes that his poem
is full of “the awful silliness [of] a hideous spiritual music”, and that
“poets should stay out of politics or become monsters”, he also knows that
poets are already civil monsters anyway – and that they have never
been afraid of making themselves look foolish to get themselves heard.

To read “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear” as it appeared in the paper, click
here.